What I learned from Veggie Tales

I watched Veggie Tales Saint Nicholas with Carey and Chloe, and I was educated on the history of St. Nick. Nicholas was a young boy from Greece whose father was a successful fisherman. Both his parents were devout Christians in the 3rd century who took seriously the fact that they were to be the hands and feet of Jesus to the poor. His parents became very ill, and they both passed away which took an emotional toll on young Nicholas. He sailed the Mediterranean for some time before he returned to confront the money hungry mayor of the city where he grew up, and by night with a disguise to hide his true identity he went about taking care of the needs of those who needed shelter, food and clothing.

Of course Big Idea took creative license to tell the story, and all three of us laughed a number of times during the animated DVD, but even in the midst of sorrow or happiness God has a way of making the story our own.

I was deeply moved by this hilarious animated short, and it won’t be a waste of your time to watch it too.

Choices

When I was in college there was a professor on campus who convinced a remnant of us to become Calvinists. It drove me crazy because I was attempting to understand the mind of God. I just want to write that God is omniscient, and in that omniscience He works with my free-will to accomplish His purpose. That’s my undergraduate conclusion for Calvinism. I write all that to basically say I’ve been given free-will to make good and bad choices.

We have a large wood carved “simplify” from Hobby Lobby on top of our refrigerator, and the older I get the more important simplicity becomes. My personal opinion is that we complicate life more than we need to, and though some of the choices we have to make are difficult there is a huge burden lifted when we make it a point to extend mercy to ourselves and others when the the wrong choice is made.

We’ve been commissioned to love each other, bare each other’s burdens, and be patient with each other when we offend or hurt each other. There’s more than one way to do life, and many times the expectations we set for each other collide with the love we desperately need. Does that mean we don’t hold each accountable for misbehavior? Obviously not because if criminals were allowed in society proper than we would have anarchy.

At some point however we must deal with the way our family of origin did life, and the way God is calling us to live our adult lives. My family of origin was quite dysfunctional, and it has interfered heavily with my marriage because my wife condemns the dysfunction when I perpetrate it. I know I shouldn’t perpetrate it, but paradoxically in the same breath I have powerful reasons for perpetrating it when I do. Her way of doing life is vastly different at times then the way I do life. And neither one of us is very patient with the other when we don’t “measure up”.

The sad thing about this is that we both want the same things. We both have the same values and priorities, but like millions of others we made great recorders but terrible interpreters. Our family of origins are seared into our memories, and though we are well into our thirties those first eighteen years at home continue to govern the choices we make. Seems to me we spend a lifetime becoming husband and wife, and in the process we filter all that through a filter I’ll call, “your family, my family.”  Somewhere in all of that, albeit imperfectly, we become “our family.”

I suppose I could sit around all day and wonder why this happened and that happened, and I have done that, but when the rubber meets the road that kind of hand-wringing is hopeless. That doesn’t put food on the table, get the oil changed nor get my daughter to school in the morning. In the long run it merely creates a pitiful existence that anchors me in a pool of fear. I refuse to make that choice. 1 Timothy tells me otherwise as well.

For God has not given us a spirit of timidity and of fear, but a Spirit of power, love and self-control.

It’s taken a long time to get to that kind of thinking, but in the process of getting there, and I never arrive, I know that choosing to forgive every day is essential to becoming what God has created for me.

One of Carmen’s songs says.

When Satan reminds me of my past I simply remind him of his future.

The powerful thing about my ability to make good choices began at the Cross. 2000 years ago Christ sealed my eternal fate by purchasing my life to dwell with Him for eternity. That single event that took place in the Greek perfect tense means it happened in the past, and it has present implications. His blood is more powerful than then the fact that I left my family high and dry when I quit my job with Coca-Cola. Survival of the fittest I like to say. God, Christ, the Holy Spirit and the shed blood gets my money every time. Placing my trust and hope in that supersedes anything I think will redeem me.

A seven-figure income, membership at a country club, a BMW, a successful business, nor my name on a building will satisfy me the way a relationship with the One who made those things possible. Those things are not wrong unless they become my lord and master, but the choice I’m given every day is whether or not I will believe that Jesus is who He says He is. He’s either a liar, lunatic or the Savior of the world, and I have placed my faith in the fact that He’s the real McCoy interested in every facet of my life.

When that becomes reality then I can dismiss any claim that says I don’t measure up. I suppose I could use this to excuse any wrong doing, but I’m not doing that. People have used Jesus to kill other people, and you can certainly twist scripture to justify what you want to do, but what I speak of here is not that at all.

Satan is the father of lies, and he is constantly trying to cover us in fear, but my choice, though it takes a long time sometimes, is to allow the love of Christ to cover and infiltrate my mind and heart. In other words, good wins out over evil every time. I won’t always choose good, but once again my faith rooted in the Cross trumps my sin, and when I repent it is literally deleted from the mind of God.

Wow!

Inspiration

This is a local coffee house known as the Donut Den I frequent.

It’s a Nashville icon and landmark in Green Hills that’s been serving coffee and donuts for over 30 years. My good friends Norman and Harold keep this place inspiring many Nashvillians. It’s kind of like a Christian Cheers. “You want to go where everybody knows your name.” And since 1991 they pretty much have.

Thank you Norman for all you do, and thank you for creating a place where many of us come to find comfort in a busy city.

Forgiveness

Here’s one of my heros named Don Miller. He wrote a book called Blue Like Jazz that changed my life. I connected with his adage that “nothing resolves”, and his candid sharing in the book has resonated in the minds of over a million of us on this global village. He spoke to a thousand of us at Bellevue Community Church Friday night, the evening was more than I expected. But that tends to happen, not when Don Miller shows up, rather when God shows up through Don Miller.

Don is actually signing my copy of his latest A Million Miles In A Thousand Years in this picture. I asked him to make it out to Daniel, and this is what follows the name my parents gave me.

Here’s to telling better stories. -Don Miller

Some of you know I’ve dreamed for some time now about writing my own Blue Like Jazz. I’ve gone back and forth between writing it and not writing it, but I honestly think Don convinced me not to write it Friday night. It’s not part of the better story I want to tell. I was sharing with Carey some thoughts as we drove out of the parking lot that night, and I think powerful teachers teach you to be the best version of who God make you to be, rather than convince you to do the things they did, so you can be like them. Don Miller was no exception.

Don’t get me wrong. Don Miller was an impressive intellectual who set out to be a published author many years ago, and he is seeing the fruits of his labor. I admire that. But what I admire more is the power of God that worked through him to show me that I don’t need to write a book to accomplish great things.

The things that are similar between Don and I involve the fact that we have people in our lives who committed sins of omission and commission, and we are obligated to forgive them because Christ forgave us.

Letting go of the “right” to take an eye for an eye empowers us to embrace everything God is putting before us to embrace. Anger, hate and revenge from the mind of man never accomplished this. I’m not blogging about a Pollyanna attitude that pretends bad things don’t happen to good people, rather I am saying that love is the most powerful thing God has created for the advancement of His cause.

Don Miller has embraced this love to change his fatherless life, and the fatherless life of 27 million other boys in the United States.

I was not fatherless, but like you I have things to deal with, and I’m going to join Don as he embraces the Father’s love that does something like save the world for eternity. That’s something worth dying for. The end result is the same for us all, and the way to that end is the same because it can’t be reached without Jesus, but our “calling” of course is different. Some of us are doctors, lawyers, teachers, authors, business owners, and the list goes on and on, but one thing that will mark us no matter who we are or what we do is the fact that sin affects us all. That makes no one better than anyone else.

We sat there and listened to Don speak to us for over an hour about a movie about himself based on a book about himself only to have him sign our copy of his latest book about himself. Don told us that this latest book tour was the most narcissistic thing he has ever done, but he would also tell you that this self-introspection has led him to the greatest work he has ever done in The Mentoring Project.

I clean houses for a living, and my friend Tiffany was at the book signing the other night, and when we spoke she thanked me for cleaning her shower curtain so well. I got a lot of satisfaction out of her compliment. Each one of us was designed by God to work and enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Forgiveness takes many years of work for most of us. It didn’t happen for me over night, and to be quite honest I’m still working through much of the pain caused by my clinical depression. I suspect we are not much different than Paul in that we have to learn to live with our thorns in the flesh. But God is never stumped by the problems of this world, and He never wrings His hands in despair because He doesn’t have a solution.

He always has a solution. I just can’t see it, but I know that if I’m anchored in Him that at some point I will. I trust that though I don’t appreciate all the “bad” things I go through that my Father is there to make sense of them for me.

Don told us so many things Friday night, but his writings in Blue Like Jazz still resonant in my head after having read it several times. One thing that he reiterated Friday night that was in Blue Like Jazz is that many things do not resolve in this life. There isn’t closure in other words. The cancer takes your wife. You loose your job. The plane flies into the skyscraper. Your brother doesn’t come home from Iraq. I don’t know why God lets these things happen, and some would argue that God causes these things to happen. I don’t know. In all of it, however, for me I think He is driving us deeper into relationship with Him. We may reject him at different times in our lives, and frankly I think He expects that, but He never leaves us nor forsakes us because a parent who truly loves their child will die for that child, and doesn’t that sound awfully familiar?

Thanks for reading. Grace and peace.

Love

I was at Starbucks this morning reading Don Miller’s latest, A Million Miles In A Thousand Years, and once again he draws you in with the realness of his life. In other words for those of you who ate Blue Like Jazz up so far this one doesn’t resolve either, and that’s why we like him. He doesn’t give any pat answers. He doesn’t tell us to try harder. The most important thing he does is point us to Jesus, and he reminds us that life was never intended to be fair.

Like all his books, this one once again tells me that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is found in relationship, primarily with the Creator and the way the Creator manifests Him/Herself through each human being.

It isn’t performance based, social status based nor gender based, rather it is a celebration of life, and the fact that God created us to love Him and others.

As I tell the teenage guys I work with, “It ain’t rocket science.”

Seek First

“We all like sheep have gone astray.” This morning I got up, and I wanted to practice my guitar. I realize in and of itself practicing my guitar is good. I made coffee, and while it was brewing I searched for a guitar pick. I have the hardest time keeping up with guitar picks! It’s frustrating, and there’s no telling how many I’ve lost. I even lost all three of my Bluebird Cafe picks! I spent good money on those!

My point isn’t about my frustration about losing guitar picks, rather I want to blog here about what God was teaching me in that situation this morning. The more I thought about it the more I concluded that the time wasn’t right to practice my guitar. Yes, I didn’t have a pick, but God uses these moments in my life to draw me closer to Him. Yes, I could have drawn closer to Him practicing my guitar, and often I do, but this morning He was communicating the importance of seeking Him first in a literal way.

I sat down at my desk, and I read John 10 out of The Message. It’s the passage about sheep and shepherds. Our youth pastor just finished a series out of John 10, and it impacted me in a deep way. One characteristic about sheep is that they are habitual creatures. Even when a habit is unhelpful they will repeat it. A lot like my tendency to lose guitar picks. It’s no wonder Jesus compared us to sheep because unfortunately we share many of the same habits. Fortunately, like sheep, we have been empowered by God to know our Shepherd’s voice, but we have to seek Him.

I’m not binding my little epiphany on anyone else here because God gets our attention in different ways. Each one of us, however, is responsible for seeking Him because without Him we would not exist much less survive. A sheep without a shepherd will not survive. The only defense they have is to run away, and frequently they do because, like me, they are consumed with fear. The past 10 years have been marked by fear for me, and I’m reminded again and again that deliverance from this fact is the voice of my Shepherd.

He takes epic and every day moments to show me this. There’s nothing too great or small that God is not active. I think I appreciated this even more after reading The Shack. To read about Mack’s story, and it is fictional, reminds me that life can be terribly painful, unbearable, and a reason for living can be lost, but when we meet God face-to-face something amazing happens. He not only gives us reason to hope, but He empowers us to see that the pain is a drop in the bucket compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ.

I never want to experience what Mackenzie experienced in The Shack, but I do want to experience what Mackenzie experienced in the second half of the book.

Seeking my Savior first sounds like a biblical cliche that we we give lip service to in Sunday School, Small Group and Sermons, but when life throws hard balls it becomes a way of life. Albeit, imperfectly, but nonetheless we will be forced to put our money where our mouths are. It’s my prayer, whether I lose a guitar pick, suffer the death of my daughter, God destine never to happen or have to die for my faith that when the rubber meets the road I will seek Him, and I won’t run away like some stupid sheep.

recovering from loss

Saturday was my 37th birthday. I was deep cleaning a client’s home that moved out of state on Friday, and I began to think about their little boy, and although he is young enough he probably won’t remember the move, it will still affect him on psychological and physical levels. We barely moved 2 blocks away in Nashville, and I clearly remember the stress it caused my daughter. I am an expert on these matters too because growing up I lived in 8 states and 1 U.S. territory. I know first hand what moving does to a child. It creates instability for a child who grieves the move, and for me personally it created an attitude of being able to escape my problems and not having to work them out. I don’t know who coined the phrase, but children make great recorders and terrible interpreters.

Thankfully, God is bigger than the grief of moving, and I am living testimony that He can empower willing humans to overcome baggage from the past.

My wife and I have been intentional about being the best parents we can be, and the choices we have made have been out of a desire to mold our daughter into what God wants her to be. Like all human beings we struggle with sin, but we try to repent and ask for forgiveness when we know we have sinned.

This blog in no way is disrespectful to my parents, but it does represent a reality I have fought hard to overcome. Like the song my daughter and I sing, “Oh know you never let go”, by Matt Redman God is pointing all of us toward a relationship with Him through Jesus Christ, and no matter what we face in life He will not let go. He never has, and He never will.

I grew up in the Church of Christ, and we sang a song called He’s Got The Whole World In Hands, and I have to tell you that I began to experience that reality as my dad’s son, but I’m living it on a deeper level as a parent. My dad fought some baggage from his past, so that I wouldn’t have to fight it, and likewise I am fighting some issues on my daughter’s behalf, so she will not have to contend with those problems. That paradox of free-will versus God’s sovereignty finds simplicity in He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands. Somewhere in the midst of that theology God allows us to experience suffering, existential questions that never get answered this side of the new earth, but most importantly a love that fathoms the best minds.

It boils down to a relationship, and when I’m faced with loss I can turn to that relationship without fear of judgement or rebuke because He knows beyond the shadow of a doubt from personal experience how hard it is to recover from loss. He also knows it’s possible because He has done it, and in the process of learning it myself I know He will never let go.

Seems to me I don’t just recover, but I soar on wings like eagles even when I get tired.

Undo-Rush of Fools

summer review

This summer began with my brothers in Disney’s Fort Wilderness. We camped out in the Green’s RV for a few days, and took in a few tourist attractions.

Sunday morning Jeremy and I got up really early to trek across town to set up for worship, and it was a joy to worship with Crystal and Jeremy as our worship pastors. They have a talent with music that blesses me deeply.

Carey and Chloe and I also got to spend a week-and-a-half on Florida’s emerald coast to soak up some sun, and get away from it all for a bit. It was a nice retreat from the grind. Carey’s cousin Danna had a beautiful wedding there in Watercolor, and Chloe was the flower girl. Good times, good times.

Sunday after the wedding we got to worship with Diane and Terry Olive in Watercolor. Terry is one of my heros, and when I was mired deep in my depression a few years ago he was a rock for me. He was a shepherd at Woodmont Hills at the time, and he had not retired from Bradfords completely, but they were spending a lot of time in Watercolor nonetheless. Terry is a classy gentleman who is a Christ follower. I literally want to emulate him not because he’s perfect, but because he’s unabashedly a man who knows God has empowered him to make good choices. He loves God, his wife, his son and the church. He’s lived a amazing life, and it’s my prayer he has many more years to glorify Him in Watercolor.

Carey and I spent a week with the teens at Coker Creek, and let me just say that the Holy Spirit was lighting fires all week long. If God can ignite a group of teenagers to worship Him with the abandon they worshiped think what He can do with a church full of disenfranchised adults who are cynical about life. He turned a valley of dry bones into living human beings. He can do it again.

It’s amazing what God begins to do when I step out of the way and let Him do it. This summer provided sign after sign from my Father that the best is yet to come, and it gives me goose bumps that there are 700 college students at Sanctuary right now, as I type this, praising the one who put breath in their lungs.

God doesn’t need Daniel, Joel, Jason and Jeremy to decide to connect in an RV one weekend. He doesn’t need Daniel, Carey and Chloe to walk upon the beach. He doesn’t need a few hundred teens and chaperones to go to camp, and He doesn’t need 700 college students to worship Him on a Thursday night.

He uses those things to show each of us personally that He has always been at work in each individual’s heart and mind. He was shown me that He is just as relevant for my generation as He was for Abraham’s generation, and when the rubber meets the road will I be willing to part with what is most dear to me for His sake. All these things and people are important because they connect me with the One  who created all people and all things. The voids I have aren’t a Mini Cooper, a “better” friend, a better job, a better wife or daughter. The voids are a God absence because when my ladder is leaning against one of these other persons or things then my ladder is going to fall because the wall isn’t stable. God is, and when I reflect on this summer the one thing I can take to the bank is that God never lets go.

Being Still

Our interior designer was in for a while today, and the results of her work are beautiful.

While we worked together we began to talk about spiritual things, and it struck me how her work was sacred. Our pastor was talking about sacraments last Sunday, and we unpacked that a tad. I grew up being taught that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are sacraments. They are sacraments, and I’ve never doubted the sacredness of both rites. They both point to my Lord’s ultimate act of heroism from the Evil One.

Our pastor opened our eyes to the fact that there are moments surrounding every second that are sacred. My designer and I performed a sacrament in designing the Tomlinson home. A Christian is a Christian because he is in connection with Christ. Sacraments are signs that Christ is present. Is this an argument for transubstantiation? No, but if the bread becomes the actual body of Christ for you when the priest puts it in your mouth then so be it. No argument here because God is big enough to connect with other in ways I haven’t experienced.

That’s why it’s so important to be still. Kristie, my designer, and I worked very hard for 4 hours today. We were not still for a moment because in those sacred 4 hours we brought peace into the Tomlinson home. It wasn’t until moments ago that I contemplated the full impact of what went on when she was under our roof. Her service not only brought beauty into our home, but it blessed our home with a presence of Christ that wasn’t there before her arrival. When people let God be God through their gifts amazing things happen. Ordinary jobs become offerings of beauty that can only be explained by the presence of Him who infuses that work with sacredness.

This has profound implications for my work as a business owner. Even when I’m cleaning house after house through a 12 hour day I know the stillness that God brings is a sacrament I don’t dread. I thank Him for the monetary blessing He put upon that family to pay me to clean their house. When I experience a baptism I thank God for the family who commits that life the way Mary committed Jesus to the life he lived on earth. Each one of us in every walk of life was created by God for purpose.

Sacraments serve a purpose. Baptism confesses to God I put my faith in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. Communion does the same. It’s that point of connection with the Creator that makes everything I do  sacred.

Kristie didn’t just “design” a house today. No, she brought an offering of sacred giftedness to the Tomlinson table, and in so doing empowered a stillness that blessed this marriage in ways I’ll be observing till death do we part, and even then we shall not part because if I’m not mistaken that man Jesus “wouldn’t stay dead.”